Human population planning/control is a means of controlling the growth rates of the human population. Human population control is the practice of changing the growth rate of the human population by imposing limits on population and birth rates, either intentionally or on behalf of the government.
Factors such as high poverty rates, environmental concerns, and religious reasons for overpopulation determine whether population control measures are necessary. Population control can be achieved by various methods including those described by Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) as a positive control over such wars, famines, diseases, infanticide, and increased mortality rates (Malthus, 1803-1989). In addition to these economic and environmental concerns, the promotion of population control reflects peoples’ different views on social reforms that are considered important steps towards improving the health of women and their families, protecting people’s reproductive choices, and improving sexual expression and sexual freedom without fear of pregnancy.
Concerns about uncontrolled population growth have existed since ancient times and scientific discussions on population issues are supported by efforts to control family size recorded in Greece, China, and other countries (Potts, 2003; Zhao, 2006). Advocacy for population control increased in the 18th century when population growth began to accelerate in many parts of the world.
Abstract The rapid population growth in the middle of the 20th century in industrialized countries led to fears of a population explosion and motivated the introduction of programs for global population control. Population-control efforts in the developing world after the war received official US approval in 1958 with the Draper Committee’s report, which set its sights on world population growth as a US security problem. At the World Population Conference in 1974 in Bucharest, population control efforts met with international opposition but owing to the strong US commitment to population control this had little impact.
Since the 1960s, US development aid has been a major donor of population control in the Third World, providing nearly half the money that funds birth control and family planning programs, including pills, IUDs, and sterilization. The Johnson administration supported population control and Congress passed the Foreign Assistance Act of 1966 which included provisions to allocate funds to population-control programs run by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The Department of Population Policy’s efforts have helped advance and integrate US policies to support the health of women, including maternal health, voluntary and informed family planning support, and the fight against HIV / AIDS in developing countries.
The risk of doomsday predictions that population growth will lead to mass starvation greatly underestimates people’s ability to meet the challenges of a growing population. If people were free to innovate and see the many benefits of our labor enterprise, we could not only meet these challenges, but also reduce the environmental impact by finding effective ways to feed, shelter, and transport the world’s people.
In 2015, 45% of governments in developed regions had policies to increase their population growth rates, and 2% had policies to reduce them. By contrast, 50% of governments in less developed regions have policies to reduce them, and 10% have policies to increase them.
In a 1972 report, Rockefeller cited the threat of population growth in the US as an alarm signal and called for a variety of population-control measures to avert the perceived threat of uncontrolled proliferation of welfare-dependent, criminalist, and other burdensome populations. These declines were consistent with trends in neighboring countries that had experienced rapid economic growth that was not limited to family size, as Chelsea Follett writes in The National Interest in her book “The Cruel Truth about Population Control.”.
We kill the goose that lays the golden egg when we listen to media’s panicked predictions that the Philippine population will double from the current 10.9 million in the coming decades unless we implement a population control program under existing laws. We should address the taboo that people have when it comes to the link between human population growth and species extinction crises.
Population control refers to the act of restricting the size of a population so that it remains manageable, as opposed to measures to protect a species from excessive extinction, known as conservation biology. Population control is an important international development strategy whose origins back to the social trends of the 19th and early 20th centuries and culminates in organized birth control movements in Europe and the USA. Population control campaigns represent attempts of white-led governments in the US and former imperial powers in Europe to curtail non-white populations in the Third World, targeting nations where local ruling groups used population control campaigns to destroy people they despised.